


hands cupped, gold and blood

by kiiouex



Series: The Taste Of Teeth [2]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Animal Abuse, Animal Death, Blood, Demonic Sacrifice, Established Contract, M/M, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-05
Updated: 2015-09-05
Packaged: 2018-04-19 03:59:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4732088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It's not an offering, kid, it's a sacrifice. There's no point if it costs you nothing to give!" </p><p>For the last five years, Dipper's end of the contract has been manageable; things he can find, things he can give. But he's still covered in all the scars of his past failures, and Bill won't stop asking for more. Established contract/relationship kind of fic, not romantic, mind the tags, Waddles is fine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	hands cupped, gold and blood

**Author's Note:**

> I had so much trouble with fic this for some reason! But I spent a long time editing, and I'm pretty happy with it now. So huge thanks to my beautiful beta [telekinesiskid](http://archiveofourown.org/users/telekinesiskid) for reading through it twice and giving me so much fantastic feedback. I hope you enjoy, please let me know what you think!
> 
> Edit: whoops I was so tired when I posted it I forgot to say it's basically a sequel to [Static When You Try To Sleep](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4526292), but it shouldn't be hard to follow if you haven't read that.

Dipper woke up in the middle of the night, heart pounding, sweat beading on his forehead, and the mark on his back burning like a coal in his bed. It happened a lot when he had bad dreams and sometimes it meant nothing, pain fading as he counted his own shallow breaths and watching the shadows shift between the rafters. He tried to will himself calm, breathe deep, but the tightness in his chest seemed to pull at the skin on his back, tug at the mark until the pain seared him.

He didn’t even know what the nightmare had been, just felt the terror up and down his spine, every nerve alight in response to nothing. In the five years he’d made the deal, Bill’s claim on him had never burned so badly. It was something like a brand, or a reminder, a crude rendition of Bill on his flesh, a huge, hard-edged triangular scar.

When the pain didn’t relent at all after the dream had ended, Dipper realised that it wasn’t an echo from a nightmare but a summons, just one that stung more fiercely than any other he had experienced.

Slowly, wincing as the pain on his back seemed to flare with his every movement, Dipper rose from the mess of his sheets and crossed to the window. He’d never moved out of the attic room, though Mabel had moved downstairs to get space for herself, and the triangular window had only gained significance over the years. He opened it, wincing at the shock of the night air, and called out, “Bill?”

The demon had always been fond of making a big entrance. Dipper used to watch with fear and awe as Bill would manifest out of the shadow of the roof or open the moon as his eye, seeing the demon warp and change the familiar world, playing so carelessly with what felt fundamental. The effect had lessened with each of Bill’s appearances, though, and Dipper waited passively as the colour slowly drained from the world, dimming until everything was varying shades of dark grey under the moonlight but for a glowing, triangular gap in the trees. 

The light solidified, settling into the demon’s usual form, cane and hat jauntily askew as he took in the surroundings. Bill seemed pleased to see Dipper, eye seeming to crinkle with amusement at Dipper’s dour face. "Long time no see, Pine Tree! How have you been?"

"Fine," Dipper murmured. The pain of the mark coupled with what he knew was ahead left him with no energy for pretence. “Just tired.”

"Don't downplay it kid, you look wretched! Still not sleeping right?" Bill laughed, positively chipper. "Better get this done so you can get back to bed! I'm worried about you!"

"But not worried enough to stop this?” The question was flat, Dipper already knew the answer. Asking was just routine.

Bill laughed, sounding like he’d be smirking if he had a mouth, smug in superiority. "I like you, kid, but not enough to let you lay around all the time!"

As if that was what he was doing. But there was no productive response, and Dipper ignored the comment. "This summons is pretty intense,” he said instead, waving a hand towards the scalding scar. “Just because you want another offering?"

Bill flicked his cane as admonishment. "Don't sound like that, it's been ages since I last asked! You’ll be getting complacent."

Dipper dragged a hand over his face. Any charm that the demon might possess had worn off on him a long time ago. "You think I can forget you own me?"

“I hope not, kid!” Again, Dipper got the feeling that if Bill had a mouth it would be stretched wide in a mocking grin. “I’ve just got to keep you busy, fill the time before I actually need you. My plans are still in motion, lots of wheels within wheels, machinations, heavy stuff you couldn’t comprehend. And what's the point in a slave if you don't order them around a bit?"

Dipper rubbed his temples as exhaustion and pain throbbed dully through his skull and spine. He just wanted to push through Bill’s chatter to get to the demon’s actual demands, but the first and last time he’d asked Bill to get on with things he’d had to wait with his tongue in his hands while the demon finished speaking. "So you want another offering; the same as last time?"

"So keen to get this over with? Fiiiine!” Bill didn’t seem any less upbeat for Dipper’s rudeness. “The last sacrifice you left was good enough I’ll take it again! So get to work, Pine Tree!"

The world’s colour didn't return when Bill faded from view, which Dipper took to mean the demon was still lurking nearby. Or he wasn't, but wanted Dipper to feel his presence heavy on his shoulders. As if the sharp burn of the mark on his back wasn't doing that already.

Dipper shut the attic windows and spent a moment with his head resting against the frame. He knew the occasional offering was a low price for surviving Bill's interest, but that didn't make it much more bearable so late at night, when the fuzz in his head felt too thick to think through.

He dressed himself slowly, wincing as every twist of his back seemed to pull at the skin under the aching mark, but he managed. He donned a heavy coat and sturdy boots, slipped a torch, first aid kit and his hunting knife into his pockets and lifted the loose floorboard under his bed.

Grunkle Stan had been proud, if surprised, when Dipper had first requested that he take his wages in gold. The generous family salary Mabel made was three dollars an hour; Dipper got a tiny nugget at the end of every week. The tin he kept under the creaky floorboards was always half full, and Dipper picked out a big chunk to take with him. Bill never seemed to really care how much he got, so long as it was real.

Dipper had taken Bill fool's gold, once. He'd learned to check after that, but he could still see the harsh line of warped skin on the back of his hand, from where Bill had rapped him with his cane. The talk with Stan about the legitimacy of his wages had been terse, and brief, and his hand had burned in his pocket.

He tried not to make any noise on the stairs as he made his way out of the shack, because Mabel and Stan might be tangentially aware of his midnight excursions but it was a lot easier to cope with them if he never had to answer questions. The ominous comments Bill was so fond of making implied it would be fruitless eventually, but Dipper still made the effort.

The woods were dark and eerie in monochrome, but Dipper's fear of them had eased off when he'd learned how little horror was native to his astral plane.

The rabbit hutch he kept was a quarter mile into the woods, far enough in to keep Mabel from stumbling onto it. After the first time he’d wandered the woods until dawn, fruitlessly hoping to track down a rabbit in the dark, he’d learned it was better to be prepared. There was still a penny-sized scar on the back of his thigh, testament to where he’d been forced to gouge out a little chunk of replacement flesh.

It had taken a lot of trial-and-error experimentation with traps and snares before Dipper finally figured out his system. There was no schedule to Bill’s demands, and so he’d eventually learned to trap rabbits live and keep them ready, feeding them on his dusk walks and waiting for the inevitable demand to end them.

The rabbit was asleep, but woke at the sound of the cage’s door opening, a little bundle of quivering fur. It didn’t try to bite him as he lifted it out gently, just sat scared in his hand. Dipper never named the rabbits he caught, never speculated on if they had babies to feed or anything else that would make his job harder. It was him or it, really. Its frail heartbeat pounded a thousand times a second against his hand, and Dipper looked away as he snapped its neck, hearing the crack and feeling stillness replace the little creature’s shakes. A limp bundle of fur in one hand, and his torch in the other, Dipper followed the light trail he’d worn further into the forest. He’d catch a new rabbit tomorrow.  

Five years ago when he had made the contract, his first task had been to prepare the altar. Bill had told him where to look, in a dark and secret corner of the woods, but digging it out had been a challenge for a twelve year old. He'd spent long hours in the woods shifting dirt and clearing space, struggling with a shovel over half his height. He’d found the flat top of the black stone first and then dug out each corner, followed the sides down to the point. Once the full stone was unearthed, he worked all the dust and grit from the carving on the top, fully restoring the inverted, pyramidal shrine to Cipher.

After that it had been small things, little bits of filched gold from his Grunkle before it was a regular requirement, or old animal bones he could find in the woods. The demon hadn't required the offerings to be fresh until he was fourteen. But lately Bill’s demands had been escalating, increasing the challenge every time Dipper managed to meet it. The repetition of his current offering was almost a relief.

The little clearing for the altar was quiet when Dipper reached it, but the black-and-white woods were still as much a testament to Bill’s presence as the furious burn of his mark. He brushed fallen leaves off the top of the altar, delaying the inevitable as much as he wanted it to be over. The familiarity, the routine of the sacrifice, it ground him down more than the pain and the isolation of his contract.

Dipper set the gold and the rabbit on the top two corners of the shrine before laying his arm over the carving and slowly drawing his hunting knife. A gift from Mabel when he turned fifteen, part of an 'explorer's' kit to help him navigate the woods. No one ever questioned the bandages on his arm, not when they matched the legitimate ones on his knees and face from his constant scrapes and cuts from his explorations, and he unwound it slowly. There was no disguising the line of scars as anything but deliberate, though the precision changed across his arm, from the first, jagged, wavering cut he'd ever made to the neat line of his last offering. He set the knife against his skin, and his breathing was calm, hands steady.

He didn't fear the pain of the ritual anymore, not after so many times. He’d spent enough time trembling and crying over his fear of the blade. It was required, and it was temporary. Blood beaded around the knife's sharp point and he bit his lip as he dragged the blade through his skin, making a long, neat gash that shouldn't be too deep to really harm him.

The wound stung, his body complaining at the deliberate injury, and Dipper's left hand gripped the edge of the altar tight while he turned his arm over to bleed down into the carving. It was a perfect equilateral triangle, edges overflowing to fill the brick pattern at the base with that ever-watching eye in the middle, new blood refreshing the deep red of the old stains. There were dried splatters of red against the edges, too, from the first time when he'd been too young and scared and he hadn't been able to stop his arm from shaking, wasting his blood against the stone.

When every crease of the pattern was full, Dipper pulled his arm back, ready with the first aid kit he’d learned to bring after the first time he’d had to creep back to the shack as a bloody mess. He bound his arm tight, ignoring the sting and focusing on pressure, before wiping the edge of the knife clean on the grass. He winced as he bent, the twist of his skin making the mark _scream_ as though the fire of the pain might actually consume him, a warning not to resist that he’d never needed, not when he’d earned a dozen medals of loyalty, had so many burns and scars to testify to his obedience.

“Bill,” he called out for the second time that night, voice heavier with exhaustion, but there was no answering apparition. Dipper spared a second to rub his temples before he began the incantation, “ _Triangulum_ ,” as though the demon was going to insist on _formalities_ , as though the grey of the world wasn’t already giving the demon away. But it wasn’t his place to complain.

As he finished, the carving on the altar flickered with blue light. The offering was set ablaze, fire rising from the boiling blood to form a hissing, flaming spectre in the air. The gold took place in the centre to serve as the eye, and the rabbit’s body unravelled, skin and bones warping hideously to form the demon’s cane. A second later, there was a roar of void and the offering was gone, Bill’s familiar form hovering over the altar in its place.

"Nice, Pine Tree, very nice," Bill said appreciatively, lighting up the black stone with his golden aura. "You're getting good at this!” His eye flickered blue, and a second later the pain of Dipper’s mark disappeared.

“Thank you,” Dipper managed, sagging with relief, revelling in the feeling of his mostly-whole body with the mark extinguished. The greyscale world around him seemed to spin, and he lowered himself to the ground, gripping the edge of the altar for support. The cut on his arm still flared with pain at the movement, and he felt drained, not equipped for any more dealings with Bill. “At least it’s the kind of offering I can provide.”

"It's not an offering, kid, it's a _sacrifice_ ,” Bill said, light around him crackling wildly. “There's no point if it costs you nothing to give!" 

His eyes widened as the triangle started to cackle. "No, it does," he started, desperately, "you don't need to ask for more, this is hard enough, Bill, honestly, I know I’m yours -"

"You’re too used to just scarring yourself up! You’re getting _comfortable_ ,” Bill declared, and there was a wild light in his eye as he spoke over Dipper’s pleas. “Go home and get some sleep, Pine Tree, I’ve got some _fun_ ideas for next time!" The demon crowed, laughter echoing in the air even as he faded against the light of the moon. Colour flooded back and Dipper dropped his head on the altar, not caring about the sticky mess pressing against his forehead.

The walk home felt like it would be too far for him to make it. Moving seemed like too much effort. Bill was chaotic, unrelenting, was going to grind him down until he was bone meal and teeth and nothing. The triangular scorch on his back seemed to throb – a warning, a reminder, a brand.


End file.
